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A little less than two years ago I had reached a particularly slow point in my business. It was nearing the holidays, and it was looking like things were going to stay slow at least until the New Year. I made the not-so-uncommon (and not-so-helpful) mistake of allowing this to affect my mood and self-esteem, and how I felt about the value of my work. I hadn’t been out on my own for long, and it was looking like my beginner’s luck had pretty much worn off.

That Wednesday night I had a conversation with my then girlfriend, to explore what I could shift that would make a difference in my business. We came up with the idea of putting out a simple video aimed at potential clients, offering free marketing and branding advice.

The next day I spent several hours recording and re-recording the video (I’m in the film business after all). Finally, I posted it on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The effect was magical. Literally magical!

In the course of the next 48 hours, six different jobs came through from six different clients, and none of them had seen the video!

How to make sense of this? What had shifted that suddenly brought in all this work, seemingly out of nowhere?

One of the clients had even previously rejected my proposal, and now suddenly had freed up the funds to work together.

Perhaps the answer was not in what I had done, but in who I was being. I had shifted from being in a mode of scarcity and need, to a mode where I was being a resource for others. If I hadn’t made that shift, I would have stayed in a place of trying to save money, conserve my resources, and take any job that came along, whether or not it was relevant to my business. I may not have had a lot in the bank at the time, but I found that I had something to give away for free.

The miraculous thing was this: what I did, had seemingly no direct relationship to the results that occurred. And yet, there was a profound correlation.

Since then I’ve experienced a similar phenomenon when looking to expand my client base.

My team and I regularly reach out to new potential clients. Rather than obsessing about the exact right wording to use when contacting someone, we’ve found that it is much more effective to focus on coming from a place of being a resource, and from that place, letting people know who we are what we bring to the table.

While this outreach yields its own results, the uncanny thing is that I am almost always contacted by other people during this same period, looking to do work together. These are people I haven’t contacted (either ever, or in a long time), who suddenly come out of the woodwork.

Several years ago, while enrolled in a course at Landmark Education, I learned about the Be, Do, Have Paradigm. The concept is simple. Most of us operate unconsciously thinking that the world operates in a Have, Do, Be paradigm. In other words, we think that in order to Be happy, we first have to Have the fancy house and the dream life, and then we can Do all the things that this having affords us, and finally, we can Be happy. That sounds pretty accurate, right?

The only problem is that the world actually works in the exact opposite way.

So, if I wanted to Have clients and increase income, I first needed to shift my Being from a state of scarcity and need, to a place of abundance and being a resource.

I made a conscious choice to Be a resource for others, then I Did the things that a person who is a resource would do, and then I naturally Have the results of this new way of Being.

This is not some mysterious mumbo jumbo, nor is it an absolute truth. This is simply my experience and the way I’ve been able to make sense of, and repeat these outcomes, over and over again.

I invite you to give this a try, and share the results you get. Happy Being!